


Rounds Ficlet

by DarkBlue



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Ficlet, M/M, Pining, Prompt Fic, Remus Lupin & Lily Evans Potter Friendship, Tumblr Prompt, jily, scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-19 18:48:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15516249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkBlue/pseuds/DarkBlue
Summary: After James was made Head Boy, Lily realizes she's fallen for him. Unexpectedly. Embarrassingly.





	Rounds Ficlet

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr Prompt by the lovely @rebellionrogers: Lily pining like crazy about James to Remus and Sirius.   
> For my fic celebration on marauders70s, tagged #m70sfics

YEAR 7 – FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6 1978

                  “I honestly still can’t believe Dumbledore made him Head Boy,” Lily shook her head, tossing her long dark red ponytail over her shoulder as she peered into the classroom. They were following the rounds of the younger prefects, Remus - as her old prefect rounding partner - was her companion as she checked their work. Desks had chairs neatly stacked upside down on them. Chalkboards were erased. Now all the young caretaker Mr. Filch had to do was mop the floors and wash the boards of dust.

                  “He’s not the same,” Remus said quietly, quickly vanishing the waste from an overlooked wastebasket. “Not since- “

                  “I know,” said Lily quickly. They didn’t talk about it, between them. James’ father dying.

                  Remus hardly talked about it with James.

                  He looked down at her seriously. “It broke him,” he said quietly.

                  “I know,” said Lily, this time staring at the floor. If _her_ dad had died. If either of her parents…she shivered. “I know he’s steadier and kind and funny and – “

                  “I didn’t know you knew that,” and Lily’s green eyes flashed up angrily to Remus’ face, only to see he was teasing her gently.

                  “Of course I know that,” she said automatically, not listening to her own words as they absently swung a tapestry aside and began to clip down the purple staircase. “He was quidditch captain. Is captain. I’ve seen him in the prefect bathroom.”

                  Remus only smiled.

                  “Shut up,” scowled Lily over her shoulder.

                  “What?” asked Remus angelically.

                  “Shut up,” said Lily again, as they emerged on the fourth floor, having bypassed the fifth. They would swing back up and then go all the way down to three.

                  “I think James really needed this,” Remus continued quietly.

                  “You should have been Head Boy,” Lily said loyally.

                  “I wouldn’t want to be,” Remus said, with a ghost of a smile. “I tend to disappear too regularly to attend all the meetings.”

                  “It is a lot of meetings.”

                  “Too many meetings.”

                  “ _Far_ too many meetings.”

                  “James hates the meetings.”

                  “He’s the only reason the meetings are bearable,” Lily admitted.

                  Remus only raised his eyebrows mildly.

                  “Shut up,” Lily said again, going faintly pink. “It’s true. At least he talks to me.” She paused a moment to pull a fallen curtain back over its hook. “At least he even _looks_ at me. The Staff acts like we’re not even there. If they’re just going to talk amongst themselves, then at least Potter and I can sit together.”

                  Remus smiled to himself.

                  “Shut _up_ ,” Lily rolled her eyes, shoving Remus’ arm. He pretended to stagger.

                  “Do you know, that this is the first time you’ve _ever_ mentioned James without pretending to gag?”

                  “That’s not true!” Lily grinned over her shoulder. “I feel like I stopped that at _least_ a week ago.”

                  It was Remus’ turn to grin. “Shut up.”

                  “And you know…” there was a horrible pause.

                  “I know,” Remus said quietly. Lily had taken James to Hogsmeade at the end of last year. It had been a pity move. James hadn’t even been appropriately agog. He had only smiled dully at her nervous chatter. Had only stared through her like a man drowning and she was offering him water. He had scared Lily. He hadn’t looked at her as if he wanted her to help him. He had looked at her as if he had wanted her to be a siren. To drown him. To finish him.

                  She had not asked again. The headspace he was in…it was clear he was only there to be punished. Punished by her when punishing himself wasn’t painful enough. Lily had been mortified to realize he thought of her that way. As something sure to end his pain through a final solution.

                  She had gone back to her room and cried.

                  For six years, she and James Potter had hated one another. Had been rivals. He had tortured Severus. And then Severus had tortured Remus. And Lily, ignorant of both, had come to the truth piecemeal, enraged and ashamed in turn. But in spite of all her screaming rows, she had never felt like Potter _hated_ her. She had always assumed he was being an ass out of self-aggrandizing arrogance. Like asking her out just for her reaction. Not out of interest.

                  And to discover that he was so assured that she hated him, to discover he thought that she would willingly crush him at his lowest moment, to even come crawling forward to her for the mercy blow to end his suffering at the loss of his parent, his confidante, his best friend, had eviscerated her. He had thought so little of her compassion, he had felt sure of her cruelty. And she had felt, for the first time since Tuni, she hadn’t deserved to be in Gryffindor. To even be at Hogwarts.

                  She had brought it up to Remus only in June, at the very last moment, on the platform before she went to King’s Cross station. And he had looked down at her and smiled sadly.

                  “James has never seen clearly when it comes to you,” he had said simply, and then left, leaving Lily to obsessively turn over the words in her mind as she slid plates across the diner tables, not for the lousy pay but for a place to get away from her empty house. From Tuni’s cleaned out bedroom. Tuni had moved in with her boyfriend, a fat, older man that bored Lily silly and stiffened her spine with his conservative rage. It had been mutual silence at first sight, both agreeing to feign politeness for Petunia, and nothing more.

                  Her mother didn’t work, but spent all her time volunteering. Her father was never at home, but that wasn’t very different from Lily’s memories of him, outside summer vacation. She still remembered the summer before third year, when they had all gone to Greece. When Tuni was still hopeful. And her jealousy more manageable.

                  And of course Lily was avoiding Spinner’s End. And all her haunts with Sev. All the places she couldn’t go, in the town that fit like an old sweater. A place she had…outgrown. A friend she had…lost. And the crushing loneliness and lack of friendship she felt acutely that Mary and Marlene and Alice just couldn’t fill. And to her disbelief, that Remus had. And the way Severus’ eyes flickered over them contemptuously all sixth year. And his seething hatred growing towards him. And when she had figured it out, Remus’ great secret, and he had told her that Severus had learned it the year before.

                  Her blood had boiled at Sev’s prejudice.

                  _It doesn’t matter_ he had told her. _Blood doesn’t matter_.

                  But in the end…she realized…it had.

                  _James never sees clearly when it comes to you_.

                  Lily realized she had lapsed into a long silence only when her feet automatically hit the stone stairs that would swing back up to the fifth floor. The fifth floor was easy: mostly advanced classrooms. Mostly empty, or only used once a day.

                  “I’m sorry,” and she laughed a little, a little self-consciously.

                  “For what?”

                  “I was ignoring you.”

                  “Oh that,” said Remus lightly. “I don’t take it personally.”

                  “Remus.”

                  “I prefer it, in fact.”

                  “Remus!” And she swatted him, hoping to sting him into a more playful mood.

                  Remus’ large grey eyes were serious as he paused in his checklist he had pulled out onto a desk. “Lily, look at me. At what I am. At what my chances are.”

                  He had been forced to sign the registry on his seventeenth birthday. It had been the first time Lily had seen him cry.

                  “I don’t care,” she said stubbornly.

                  “And Sirius-“

                  “I don’t care,” she said, even more loudly.

                  Remus half smiled. “And you from a muggle upbringing.”

                  “That doesn’t matter.”

                  “I don’t think same sex relationships are quite so accepted as they are in ours.”

                  “No,” said Lily after a moment. She smiled mischievously then. “It’s rather a pity that I didn’t fall for Alice instead, just to really wrinkle my sister’s forehead.”

                  Remus smiled at her, gathering his checklist as they walked to the next room.

                  “Instead of who?”

                  “Hmm?”

                  “You said it’s a pity you didn’t fall for Alice _instead_.”

                  “It’s instead of whom,” Lily said irritably, going rather pink. She caught Remus’ patient smile. “But you knew that,” she relented.

                  “Yes. But it sounds so pretentious when you say it.”

                  “It does.”

                  “But I’ll do it.”

                  “No, you don’t have to.”

                  “That you like instead of _whom?_ ”

                  Lily quickly crossed the classroom floor; most classrooms had two doors, and she cut the U shaped corridor in half by crossing to the other open door.

                  “Lily?” Remus’ voice was teasing, but also gentle.

                  “I can’t even imagine how my brother-in-law would feel.”

                  “Future brother-in-law,” amended Remus.

                  “Yeah. Him. _Vernon_.”

                  They both laughed at the tone. The shrill way she had said it. It was not a very good impression of her sister. It sounded rather like a horse.

                  “It’s just,” Lily said finally, after Remus patiently waited her out another floor and they reached the second floor.

                  “Just?” prompted Remus.

                  “Well obviously he _knows_ he’s good looking.”

                  “He does?”

                  “Course he does. He works out five days a week.”

                  Remus hid his smile.

                  “I mean…his face isn’t bad, of course.”

                  “Of course,” Remus said seriously.

                  “Shut up!” Lily said hastily.

                  “I was not speaking.”

                  Her face was blood red and she dropped her face in her hands as she dropped with a thunk into a desk. “Oh Remus,” she half-wailed and half-laughed. “How did this happen?”

                  Remus did not answer, only put his hands in his pockets and stared down at her.

                  “I mean,” Lily snickered half-hysterically. “You’re supposed to hate each other for life! Everyone knows it! Every knows _about_ it. And suddenly he stops being an arrogant big headed prick and is… _nice_?” her voice was bewildered.

                  “James has always been nice,” said Remus, but reflected privately at the same time that James’ being able to show how nice he was had often been misconstrued as teasing.

                  “But not to _me_ ,” Lily laughed. ( _Wailed? Howled?_ _Certainly not_ , her mind snapped irritably). “And now…now he’s…he’s the bright spot in meetings. And he’s funny. And he’s…thoughtful.”

                  “James has-“

                  “Always been thoughtful?” Lily guessed dryly.

                  Remus thought about the moment James had decided – for all of them – to become animagi for him. To keep him company. Because his twelve-year-old heart had been lonely.

                  “You really have no idea,” he told Lily. Because there was that part of the secret – at least – she didn’t know yet.

                  “I know he took in Sirius,” said Lily quickly.

                  “Yes,” said Remus, and his mind shied away from the violence of that fight. Of the repercussions sure to still fold out. Reggie was wearing the skull and snake now.

                  Neither brother pretended the other existed.

                  Remus felt his heart seize up, his face spasm with the pain of it.

                  “I’m sorry for him,” Lily said quietly. “I can’t even imagine.”

                  “Oh, don’t be too sorry for me,” said a drawling, hoarse voice, and they both jumped, Remus yanking his hands out of his trouser pockets and spinning around, his tired face breaking into a surprised, delighted smile. The sun from behind clouds.

                  “Hello,” he said as Sirius sauntered in, and he was wearing his infamous half-smirk. He waggled his eyebrows to Remus, held out a hand. Squeezed. Dropped.

                  Then he waggled his eyebrows at Lily.

                  “Saying things about my mate, James?”

                  “No!” Lily said quickly. Too quickly. “Nothing bad.”

                  “Didn’t say you were saying bad things.”

                  Lily flushed even harder and dropped her face back into her hands. “What am I going to _do_?” she moaned.

                  “The obvious. Probably,” Sirius said, slinging his arm around his taller boyfriend’s shoulders.

                  “Which is?”

                  “Don’t,” Remus said warningly to Sirius, who had opened his mouth with a wicked grin, probably to say something filthy.

                  “Shut up!” Lily yelped.

                  Sirius only laughed.

                  Remus, now that he had an audience for his quiet sense of dry humor, slunk into a chair himself and gestured at Lily to Sirius. “She was just saying James’ has got a nice body.”

                  “It is nice,” said Sirius at once, gesturing back at Remus. “We’ve seen it.”

                  “Yes,” said Remus, angelically. “All of it.”

                  “Very nice,” agreed Sirius. “In our professional opinions.”

                  “Our professional gay opinion?” Remus asked in surprise. “I didn’t realize we were being paid to consult.”

                  Sirius threw his arm around Remus’ shoulders, more satisfied now that he was sitting down, leaning his hip into his shoulder. “We should be. Pay up, Evans.”

                  Lily was laughing too hard to hear the scuffle of feet.

                  “There you are!” James’ accusing voice, and she shrank a little into the desk, trying not to be seen. Trying not to ruin the moment between him and his friends.

                  There was no answer, and Lily looked at the other two, confused. But they had gone. She looked up quickly, frowning. James was talking directly to her. Frowning down at her. Like they were friends.

                  “Sorry?”

                  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Staff meeting in ten minutes.”

                  “Right,” Lily said, her heart flipping double time and then sinking sorrowfully, a bird hit with a stone. He only needed her for the meeting.

                  “Anyways, I wanted to grab a quick bite from the Great Hall; it’s so near the Staff Room. Are you coming?”

                  Lily looked at him, her forehead creased. “What?”

                  “Coming? To eat?” James repeated impatiently.

                  Reflexively, Lily looked over her shoulder to see who James could be talking to; he never talked to her like this. Like…like a _friend_.

                  “Me?”

                  “Yes, you. Who did you think I was asking, the paid experts?”

                  Lily went scarlet, and grinned in mortification.

                  James grinned back at her, but it wasn’t malicious. It wasn’t even teasing. It was like the sun, and it had been a long time coming.


End file.
